Thursday, August 25, 2011

Five Things the Enlightenment Desktop Does Best

Fair warning, I am a huge fan of the Enlightenment desktop. The following items in this post are things I believe the Enlightenment desktop (and it's developers) are doing better than some of the other open source desktops.

Maintain Old ReleasesPeople are always resistant to change and switching your desktop environment is a major change. When KDE and Gnome both had their last major releases they promptly dropped their previous releases like a bag of bricks. The Enlightenment 17 desktop, while still in development, has been stable and ready for use for a long time now. Even so they have team members that maintain their older E16 release. It is still used (and liked) by many and there are no plans to discontinue it any time soon.

A Focus on Speed and New FeaturesThere is no doubting that all of our modern desktops have been progressing in features and functionality. One spot where Enlightenment excels though is that it has a focus on remaining trim and fast while adding these new features. Don't believe me? KDE 4.x needs around 512megs to be happy, Gnome 3 recommends slightly more at 768 and Ubuntu's Unity desktop requests a full gig!

Someone always pops up and cries out "but our computers are so powerful it doesn't matter" whenever you mention system requirements these days. The fact remains though - it does matter. A desktop that runs fast on a slow system will fly on a quick system. Resources should be there for your applications to use, not for your desktop environment to eat up. Trim as Enlightenment already is, the developers are currently in the process of rewriting all of it's code to utilize XCB to replace XLib - which will make it even faster.

A Flexible EnvironmentWhile KDE has a fair bit of configuration options, the developers behind Gnome 3 and Unity have decided that taking control away from the end user is a good thing. I'm sure this denial of user choice is tailored after Apple's OSX - which has about as many configuration options as a Model-T Ford. If you don't let the user customize things they can't possibly break things right?

The Enlightenment desktop doesn't assume it's users are morons and doesn't assume you are using it on a small touch screen device. It gives you the power to do with it as you will. You can leave it at the defaults or configure it to your liking.

Enlightenment for a Desktop

Enlightenment for a Touch Screen

Seamless RestartsEnlightenment can do a full restart of it's desktop environment without affecting the state of any of the currently running applications. While this may not seem entirely useful, this feature is a blessing when your desktop of choice has an "opps" and crashes. I'm sure if Unity or Gnome 3 had this feature it would have saved many users lots of grief in the last few months.

Run Everything ToolI'm not going to go into everything the Everything tool can do here - but to list a few features it can act as a system menu, quick launcher, web search, file finder and much more.

What do you think? Are any of my points here valid or are they way off point?

My enlightenment desktop on my Bodhi 2.0.1 OS equipped desktop is anything but ugly and tacky-and I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to computers.Jeff and all those who made it possible-great job on the latest version of Bodhi.

@Anonymous I don't recall Windows 2000 having compositing, animated backgrounds or window manager effects. In fact the only thing that those so called "amazing" desktops have is slightly more easing effects during window transitions, less ability to customize the interface and a lot of hooks to programs running needlessly in the background. I like Ubuntu and Gnome, am impartial about KDE and think mac OS X is one of the ugliest things going(And it hasn't changed since Windows 2000). So I guess opinions are like some other things I could mention that everyone has.

@JeffHoogland I think where E falls short is that it has horrid PR, a small dev team and almost 0 documentation to help newbies onboard. What they've done is essentially build a darned warp engine, say it would get you to the moon fast and would look cool doing it and not tell you how it works or what else it can do. Let's face it Bodhi is really the only thing going and Agust is pretty much THE look of E. Regarding the everything launcher, I find it clunky and far less useful than something like synapse, GnomeDo or launchy. It just doesn't follow some conventions(I can't remember specifics right now) and wasn't super intuitive from my experience.

All that said Enlightenment is a darned warp drive. Super fast with abilities nothing else even really touches and if it had more developers, someone with some PR knowledge and less steep curve for entry with better documentation I think it would increase in popularity exponentially. I know that there is a significant user base sick of being told how to use their computers and being boxed in. I think Bodhi is a great step towards that future, but you're only one man and a handful of super awesome people in the community.

Re. Windows 2000 look, this is something always thrown at Linux desktop environments strange enough. It may have had a point with Gnome 2, although others will assert it was mimicking OS X, but that's exactly why I chose Gnome when I switched to Linux full time in 2005.Funny enough, Enlightenment is as far away from that old look as it only possibly could be.

Awesome post. I feel the same with E-17, the rightful heir of KDE 3. KDE was good, but they made it awful in version 4. E-17, in the other hand, will pick all the KDE 3 orphans(me included) and will take them ahead. A terrific DE, low overhead, fast, plenty of eye candy, and the option of not crashing, it's a 10 by my book.

also the only 'ugly' part of e is its window appearence (the top part of window where the close button is) I haven't found a theme to make it a nice glassy odern look yet. but that's just my personal preference. The rest of e is beautiful

I've been using Linux since 1995 and went to using it as my main desktop in 2000. I've used all the various flavors and had pretty much settled on Ubuntu until Unity came along. Then I switched to my old friend Fedora and didn't much care for Gnome 3 either. So I eventually went to Linux Mint and PCLinuxOS. Both work well on my laptop, but they still were not what I wanted in a configurable desktop.

Then I stumbled on Bodhi Linux around the first of the year (I don't remember the exact release #). I've been with Bodhi ever since. My laptop is a 5 year old Dell Inspiron 1501 with 2mg of memory and is a dual core AMD Turion 64 x2. Bodhi literally screams on this 5 year old machine.

Jeff and his team have done a great job with the distro. I'd highly recommend giving it a try.

Is Bodhi available in 64bit yet? Looking forward to that. I use Bodhi but its on an old 32bit desktop of mine. And yes, with it runs really really well on that box, I would like to install it on my Quad core as well with full 64bit support.

I hate the glassy/glossy look, and I hate the bubble-glass buttons. If there were a good, flat, non-glossy/glassy, effectsless theme I would love it. I for one would prefer an OS/2 or Win2k look. Other than appearance, I love Enlightenment.

I've been running Bodhi since about April and I've enjoyed it and the Enlightenment desktop quite a bit since then.

The one change I would love to see with Bodhi would be going to a Debian base (like Linux Mint Debian Edition!). Having played with LMDE GNOME vs vanilla Katya I can say the Debian Edition is faster and uses less RAM on my ancient Athlon XP 2500+ system. I only have 1 Gig and the change was very noticeable. It wasn't just the memory disparity, CPU load was significantly less both while the system was idle and in use (tabs in Firefox, episode of the Daily Show, etc). My CPU load while idle under Linux Mint can sometimes sit around 40% (I have no idea why) but LMDE is usually around 10-15% while idle.

I have to weigh in here on two of your points. First off, even with the Shell on, GNOME 3 consumes less resources all except for VRAM compared to GNOME 2. I think these results will become more evident as more users test it. I'm on a phone, but I can upload my simple benchmarks if you'd like. Graphics performance is also far better in GNOME 3.

Second, GNOME Shell restarts without a logout or closing applications, and can be reset by typing 'r' at run command.

Also, metacity and gnome-panel are maintained in release 3. But I guess that doesn't count. I should mention I'm a huge fan of e17, and I agree that the lack of customization in GNOME 3 can be troubling if you don't like it as is. I should also recognize that many themes and extensions exist, anyway, but not yet in an integrated way like e17. KDE and e17 are equals in that area, I'd say.

I'm currently running E17, LXDE, Gnome 3, Unity, Unity 2d, and KDE all on Ubuntu 11.10 alpha. Unity (and to a lesser extent Gnome 3) trained me to better use what I always knew I could, but didn't mess with because I didn't "grok" them fully. I didn't use workspaces much before Unity, now I do all the time.

I never bothered much with Gnome-Do, but now the Unity overlay makes it so central, it "clicked" and now I get it. No mouse movement would ever be as quick as hitting the super/meta/windows key, typing the first few letters of an app or file, and then hitting enter.

The key to productivity on all these is learning the keyboard shortcuts. I love Unity's use of Compiz shortcuts tied to the super key. As a power user with half a dozen apps in use at once for work, Unity is brilliant.

Linus' specific Alt-Tab complaint about Gnome3 bothered me to death too until I learned they put some functionality in the Alt+[key above Tab]. Ah, that wasn't so bad after all. Gnome3 still has one major complaint that the pop up window to save a file is immovable. That means it usually covers up some text that I may want to see to type a title.

Both Unity and Gnome3's focus on Super + typing what you're looking for have made the "Run Everything" make perfect sense in E17, a feature I wouldn't have bothered with had Unity/Gnome3 trained me to be a better power user.

What I don't like is saying that Unity or Gnome3 are for average users. Average users are idiots. They are designed to improve the habits of those who want to be more computing efficient. HOWEVER, without providing keyboard shortcuts, you might as well shoot the user in the head.

Those first two didn't have as many start up apps like gwibber and libnotify and extra applets. I also haven't enabled much in E17 and GTK2 and GTK3 apps still look ugly like GTK1 so I need to figure out how to fix that.

The fact that Gnome Shell 3 and Unity are much better with shortcuts is quite ironic.

If you look at all the classic linux X desktop Window Managers like twm, fwm, afterstep, E16, IceWM, Blackbox, OpenBox, Fluxbox, etc, is you will find a heavy reliance on shortcut keys.

When users complain that these environments don't work for them, the power users for whom they do work, have usually customized things, especially shortcut keys.

The big drive from Desktop Environments like KDE 1, KDE 2, KDE 3, KDE 4, Gnome 1 and Gnome 2 is the desire to create a desktop that users can feel productive in without having to memorize shortcut keys. The great equalizer? Everything being quickly and easily accessible with the mouse.

So when the successors to Gnome 2 (both Gnome Shell 3 and Unity) create desktops for regular users that make using the mouse so inefficient that the only way the desktop is usable and productive again is fur the user to learn shortcut keys, I find it rather funny.

I say try one of the lighter Window Managers and leave the Desktop Environments behind. Most of them have a 15 year track record of being productive and easy to use...once you learn a few shortcut keys.

I'm surprised to hear that any distribution has problems with upgrades now, especially Bodhi which is Ubuntu/Debian based. Debian has been relatively easy for me to upgrade over the last decade and that is one of the stated goals of the project. While x.org, acpi support, grub 2 and free desktop brought a few major changes recently, Debian's package management system has actually gotten better at resolving problems. Even image based installs like Mepis upgrade binaries while leaving the user's home partition in tact.

My current desktop has smoothly evolved from a couple of desktops started in 2005 or so. These desktops have merged and split again to fit particular hardware but my laptops have enjoyed conspicuous constancy. Debian made it relatively easy.

Bodhi has a good deal of the Ubuntu bloat cut out by default (they just pre-install stuff most people don't need). Moving to Debian brings a slew of other issues with it though. Namely unless we build on Debian Stable (meaning tons of dated software and even more backporting than I do now) the system is fairly unstable.

If you don't believe me look at the number of issues the "quick fix" thread for LMDE addresses.

I've been using Bodhi for a few months now and I love it. I just love being able to easily customize nearly every aspect of my desktop. I also very fond of the extremely quick boot time compared to GNOME and KDE. I only wish I could change the shape of windows from 4 sided shapes to something else, but I don't think any desktop environment allows that.

As a starting point Jeff decided to base Bodhi on Ubuntu, but the Bodhi project has always stated the wish to later on create a new version based on another core distro. That has given place to many opinions suggestions and projects in the Bodhi forums. The final agreement was to build a 64 bit version, from ground zero. That's an open end work in process. The truth is that Bodhi, like many other Distros, is a not for the profit organization. It's also a very young Distro that still has limited resources. Everyone that is part of the Board team loves Linux and the Bodhi project, but can only cooperate at their spare time, Jeff included. This means that by now, the implementation of new important projects will depend a lot on the availability of new developers interested in cooperating on its implementation.

Wowowow Jeff, how can you have 90 MB on Bodhi? E17 on Bodhi (and Ubuntu for that matter) only takes 30 MB on this machine and I have some extra E-Modules loaded up. Note that I only count E17 itself in this matter, I have not counted Xorg-use.

We had hoped they would be ready for our 1.2.0 release this weekend, but alas there are still issues that need to be resolved with the XCB rewrite. Because of this XCB will not be included in a default Bodhi ISO until 1.3.0 (to be released sometime around the new year).

E packages with this feature enabled will be in our test repo starting the day after our 1.2.0 release though.

I am a new Bodhi fan. Thank you for all of your hard work. If I could make one wish come true for my Linux desktop it would be that Canonical would bring the Bodhi team under their umbrella as an official Ubuntu distro.Bodhi is easily the best new distro in my opinion. Ubuntu with an Enlightenment desktop seems like a no-brainer to me. They want something that can scale across devices, Bodhi has met this challenge for me so far.I haven't used it on a touch screen yet, but it seems this could easily be made into a good touch screen experience.

Thank you Jeff for bringing Bodhi to us. It is really a delight to use.

However, I am also a bit worried with the developing bloat of Ubuntu. I do hope that the memory and cpu requirements will not go up further with the next LTS release of Ubuntu.

I heard that the Mint team is ironing out their stability problems by introducing the "latest" (tested apps) and "incoming" (to be tested apps) repos. User can get update packs once a month. This is how they intend to keep their rolling releases stable.

Another variant was chosen by SalinOS (also based on Debian stable). They added a backports repo for their users.

I am glad that E17 is being done again. I for one do not like Bodhi Linux but glad they are pushing out E17 and showing it to people who would not know it existed. E17 does not thrill me but glad they are rewriting things and maybe one day I will use it all the time. I just use it for a little while and go try some thing else.

you make alot of good points. in eg. XFCE has some of the things enlightenment does eg session restore/saving and speed (and few features). and obviously compared to the other DE's enlightenment clearly is in it's own class. However I have trouble with (and currecntly stops me from going full blown into enlightenment is) the but ugly GTK themes. I can choose a theme in enlightenment and the GTK theme stays the same ugly look. is there a way to make the themes automatically match when I switch the theme on enlightenment?

"I wish there were seamless upgrades in linux"Doh! Of course there are seamless upgrades - it's called Debian and Ubuntu is NOT Linux (Linux is a kernel)

"I'm sure if Unity or Gnome 3 had this feature it would have saved many users lots of grief in the last few months. "Well Gnome 3 does have this feature which you might have known had you actually used it. And please don't forget the years and years it's taken to make E17 usable.

Make Bodhi a rolling release and watch your stats skyrocket. While we do have Arch and LMDE these might (understatement) be too much for our newest users. Like everyone else out there I grow weary of the fresh install process - even though I could (and have) made my /home on a separate partition, there are always things that don't 'play nicely'. Fix that, make a rolling release like OpenSUSE 'Tumbleweed' and many a convert (me too!) you will have!

I'm presently running E16 and have found this to be a good choice for me. With all the different flavors of Linux that are available combined with the different environments and window managers it takes time to discover what works. This has been an ongoing project for me that has included testing the various distributions.

I have also discovered that people in general are an impatient lot. They want what works, but without the fuss of learning to use what they have and how to make it a competent tool for everyday computer use.

To Jesse B.: Debian Squeeze (the current Debian stable release) was actually released back in February of this year. The reason I know this is because I'm currently running CrunchBang Statler Xfce edition, which is based on Squeeze and only came out like a day or two after Squeeze was released, and I love it! :-)

Oh, and Jeff, I remember your list of your personal top 20 favorite GTK themes from earlier this year or possibly sometime last year. Thanx for including my "Country Oak" theme in that list. :-)

Have been a Linux user since 1995. I think that I have experimented with fifteen different distros since then, starting with SuSE - it was packaged for retail locally. Wow! have things changed. Downloaded Bodhi when she was lacking an integer. Worked, but was buggy. Still very interesting as it came with Enlightenment, something I had played with previously - even sent the Greeks some cash.The current release is awesome - but I need to know how to package programs, I suspect. And I am anxious to see if QT will play well in this sandbox, how will emacs work, etc.

I used to run E a long time ago, when it was more of a preview of what could be. I'm planning on D/L Bodhi soon to try the new version on my laptop. My present setup is strongly based on Compiz and the use of a completely transparent Desktop Cube and Skydome. I'm not sure whether E will be sufficiently down the compositing path, but I'm curious to find out. I would love to see the workspaces of E to be moved into 3D space, and allow any surface in a 3D space to be a workspace - IMHO it's time we moved past the flat 'desktop' metaphor, and take the 'workspace' metaphor into the next phase. Once this step is taken, an entire new generation of 3D-space oriented tools will start flooding the market, developed by smart and creative users. And, just for the record, yes I'm a geek, have been using Linux for much more than a decade. I've been promoting 3D workspaces for more than twice that. Why can't I move around my 'room', that contains full contextual information about everything I work on at different times, and work at different 'stations'? At this point there's no technical reason not to.

I really like what I'm seeing so far with Bodhi Linux. Not too sure I like Midori for the browser though...I prefer Chrome or Chromium. Enlightenment looks great though, and I LOVE how you can choose from different themes when you first boot it up. I'm also definitely looking forward to the rolling releases and the 64-bit version 2.0. Keep up the good work!

I really like the Bodhi Linux, but there is a problem ... I am using in the three keyboard layouts and can not adjust the built-in easy keyboard shortcut to switch between them. Correct the situation please.

Arch is an up-to-date no-bloat rolling-release meta-distribution precompiled and optimized both for i686 AND x86-64. It is mainly geared towards power-users, because its extreme degree of choice is usually overwhelming to beginners (though great documentation and forum support certainly helps).

I believe this makes it a good core to base a distribution off. Bodhi could then be distributed as a metapackage with a list of pre-selected packages and setup-files, maybe also an extra pacman-repository, some installation /setup program and maybe a great packman-based sysadmin GUI-tool.

A live-CD is of course still a must, and this does not need to be updated very often since, given broadband, updating can be done during installation.(As inspiration for a simple mechanism to build on:https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_from_Existing_Linux#A_Third_.28And_Simpler.29_Method )

For those without broadband; a DVD with a copy of some relatively updated repositories should be simple to make and distribute, and would not need any kind of special treatment or reinstallation.

I believe this would have the following main consequences:

1: Bodhi would become a rolling release distro; Always very up-to-date.2: Users could select between 32bit or 64bit at installation, default being whatever the cpu supports (native).3: Bodhi would become even faster and leaner on system resources.4: After the transition, the Bodhi developers would have less work to do, since I bet maintaining some configuration-scripts, a pacman-repository and a metapackage requires far less work / frustration than modifying and stripping each new release of ubuntu.5: The major drawback, as far as I can see: lack of support for CPU's older than i686. This might be remedied by providing repositories where everything has been recompiled for i586 or even i486, but I don't know how much work that would entail.

Final note: I have not yet tried Bodhi, but I think I am about to. Have some old laptops I want to revive. :-)Jan.

I used enlightenment 16 for years and began to use E17 back in the days when the only way to get it was to build it yourself. My laptop will soon have its 8th birthday, has maxed out the RAM it is physically possible to insert (1 Meg) and has a plain Jane video card. Nonetheless, it blazes with Bodhi, looks beautiful and does things that would otherwise require a high end video card. I marvel at the number of people who purchase a new laptop after 2 or 3 years because their old one "is running slow". I cannot think of a better distro to recommend to others, regardless of how light or heavy their hardware resources are. Many thanks for Rasterman, the E17 developers and to Jeff and the Bodhi team!

Heres a good one for you.... Installed it on my cousins old Celeron 633mhz computer with 192 megs of ram... It now boots almost as fast as a modern computer with windows, crashes far less often, and easy enough to use for someone that doesnt even know what a linux is. All in all, I have to say great work, although I run e17 with a gentoo box, I do have Bodhi as a live USB. Keep it up :)

Enlightenment has been brilliant in using eye candy for things that are productive, instructive, and useful. I find the surge in eyecandy in desktop environments (starting around 2004 maybe with wobbly windows) was too often "candy for candy's sake." Enlightenment makes it pretty, but makes what's pretty *useful.*

Agreed! What stuns me is Bodhi's smooth menu animations and such running on an ancient 350MHz P3-700 with a mere 128MB of RAM. OK, I can't edit a huge bitmap in GNU IMP without swap activity slowing the response, and more RAM is always good - but it surfs the web just fine.Ben

Best desktop environment out in my opinion. I really like the speed and flexibility it offers. It looks great and feels great, does not get in the way and I can make it look and behave exactly as I want. I have QT, GTK2 and GTK3 apps which just blend in with no problems at all. I am running e17 on Arch x64 on Slim and it is a pleasure to use - I don't think I'll find a better DE for productivity. I installed Bodhi on an ancient spare laptop for some older non tech people, setup some great default apps for them and they have not had any problems with the DE at all. Thanks for making this so easy Jeff, big fan.

Bodhi is among the best linux distros. Plain and simple. True that KDE takes too much ram and is annoying. Simplicity rules and is the future btw. I just know it. Many people I know have stopped using ubuntu and are only now into Bodhi or Crunchbang.

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